How to Prepare a Guitar

1 – Introduction

1.1 – Existing Literature about the Subject

There is not much literature about how to prepare a guitar and why this can be useful for altering sounds. I could only find one book about it, Prepared Guitar Techniques by Elgart/Yates. It’s a small 24 page self copied booklet, which might be useful as an introduction for people not familiar with the technique at all. Though the booklet is not mentioning all possibilities how to prepare a guitar. Not very strange, because Elgart and Yates play prepared acoustic guitars and you can do a lot more with electric instruments.

The pickup of an electric guitar works, in contradiction to the acoustical resonating hollow body, very local and picks up only the vibration of the strings within its own close surrounding. Only the part of the string right above the pickup is amplified. And besides the difference how the string vibration is made audible, also the overdrive present on an amplifier increases the volumes of the overtones, which are less prominent in acoustic sound. Preparing guitars has all to do with changing the timbre, and this overdrive enhancement is an important factor to receive the best result.

1.2 – The Term ‘Tabletop Guitar’

‘Tabletop guitar’ is a different name for prepared guitar. A somewhat confusing term, because it can also refer to lap steel slide guitars, and preparing guitars has nothing to do with that playing technique.

1.3 – Types of Guitars

Hollow body electric guitars are less convenient, since they easily generate a humming feedback. Humbucker employed guitars give also a lesser good result, since the humbucker takes away a large amount of the overtones, which are a very important aspect of preparing guitars. The solid body single coil guitars give the best result.

1.4 – What’s the Use of Preparing a Guitar?

I sometimes hear some musicians mentioning they are not very into preparation, because it looks silly on stage. I agree, the slow performance also annoys me. Seeing a guy busy with playing the guitar like a dentist filling a hole in someone’s teeth is not very sexy. But preparing can be very useful, especially when you are recording and you don’t have to worry about pleasing an audience with an exciting stage appearance.

One of the first interviews started with a very often asked question, followed by a preconception of the interviewer: ‘If you are interested in altering sound, why don't you just use effect pedals or a computer to work with? With those things you can compose any kind of sound you like.’

'No, you can't', was a grumpy answer I gave sometimes, knowing I couldn’t convince them and being kind of annoyed people didn't understand why I did it my way.

I'm beyond that frustration nowadays and I partly like certain timbre aspects of both other media as well. Though I like to compare the usage of effect pedals with using Photoshop filters on pictures. Only use them as a true expression and not for cheaply filling up the lousy source.

Hopefully my 3rd Bridge Helix essay clarifies why preparations can cause a natural and objective pleasant sound. In my opinion the effects on the timbre achievable with certain preparations are very cool and much more intriguing than working with effect pedals. I’m not saying it is not possible to get good sound from a multi-loop station or a computer. Some results are quiet exciting, but often the results when these two methods are being used, are missing the essential point. A delay pedal always sounds fake for instance and in my opinion very poor. Chorus, Flangers and Phasers same story. Pitch shifters as well as ring modulators give an unpleasant unnatural timbre. Weird sound is by far not always sounding nice. Raising weird sounds in a natural way causes a self-filtering process where consonant sound is automatic more upfront than inharmonic sustained sounds (present in the electronic and digital competing examples above). For me the best way to alter sound is trying to manage it in a physical way. There are ways to generate effects like Reverb, Chorus, Delay, Flange, Pitch Altering, etc. by preparing a guitar. Not always easy to manage, but when once generated and fitting well with the other played tones, it is giving the music a very good feeling.

In addition to my opinion I found some other similar answers from the prepared guitarists Hans Tammen and Bill Horrist explaining why they choose that approach of working. Perhaps their answers clear out a bit more too. Most of what they mention parallels my ideas.

Hans Tammen

on his site www.tammen.org/pro_endg.html:

'Those effect pedals aren't very flexible anyway. They often do just one sound, or a little variation on it. But I'm interested in the relation between multiple sounds, placing them in order, or juxtaposing them to create a sonic progression. But for that, and for the people you're playing with, you need to be flexible and fast.

I figured the best way was to use all sorts of materials to agitate the strings, sticks, stones, screws, metals, motors and the like, because a slight change in the position of the screw can create something totally different. For many, many years I couldn't pass by a hardware store without checking out the materials, and the only thing I regret is that they don't let you in with a guitar and an amp to test everything.'

Bill Horist

Some citations out of an interview on www.silbermedia.com/qrd/archives/29billhorist.html:

‘The possibilities inherent in the physical relationship between object, string, and pickup is pretty exciting stuff. Developing a language through such methods also really sets you in your own space.’

‘Since instrument preparation lends itself well to improvising, I like to avoid the pitfalls of routine and attempts to recreate.’

‘Currently the tuning is F#/B/B/F#/B/A. The lowest string is the first B. It's a tuning that almost seemed to evolve out of my lack of interest in applying a tuning. After several years of not tuning while I played, this became some sort of default. It wasn't intentional or conscious at all. It's kind of a weird dialectic because, on one hand, I could say the tuning is absolutely critical to my sound; but on the other, it really doesn't matter at all. If I used a different tuning, that would be critical to my sound. It's like that aspect of chaos theory - sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The tuning will dictate everything about how the strings operate in conjunction with the objects, no matter what the tuning is. So I could and will eventually change the tuning and discover how the objects behave anew.’

‘The name of the game really is in the interaction between string, pickup and object.’

QRD - You did a recent set of solo guitar recordings completely without effects, why did you want to do that?

Bill – ‘It was to find a better arena to explore the microscopic sounds that result from instrument preparation and let them be the focus - something that can often get lost in swaths of loops, delays and other effects. Further, I liked the idea of creating one of those "in the room" recordings - like old blues records, you know, one mic, one amp, and in my case, a pile of detritus!’

The digital and electronic world is more suitable for other people I guess, no offense and everybody is free to not follow me. It could be some digi-genius can convince me. In my opinion making arts starts with being excited about something in your close surrounding. Besides all the mentioned complaints about bad sound results, I think the main reason is I just don't get very excited about making music with screen or a keyboard in front of me. I prefer a group of electric amplified strings to play with.

1.5 – Don’t be careful

Some people are afraid of touching their instrument and even more of preparing it. The book of Elgart/Yates mentions how to protect your instrument. I regard this chapter not very useful. To my aesthetic conviction a broken instrument is also a good instrument to explore and derive new sounds from. Maybe a bit infantile Dada or Punk to make such a statement, but I think it is true, when it comes to avant-garde art. There are quiet some musicians of which I hope they one day will damage their guitar instead of moving on in their same traditional boring approach of making music.

Unfortunately guitar preparation doesn’t break instruments. It will not soon happen added objects will cause sound problems afterwards. It doesn’t affect the tonality or intonation in any way. The neck will not become bended, at least I’ve never had this problem and I did quiet some rough preparations in the past. The frets will not drop out or get hurt by an added piece of metal. The pickup will not become demagnetized. Nothing can really happen and I think trying the technique brings you further in understanding what good sounding music is about.

Go to Chapter 2 Prepared Guitar Techniques, 2.1 Third Bridge

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